Install templates for Pages 08

13 December 2007 · 3 comments

A year or two ago I needed to turn material I’d written for a website into a printed book. I used Apple’s Pages.app to do the work. Today I had a query from a reader about some of the finer points of using Pages.app for creating a 16 page booklet, and promised to write some [...]

 

A year or two ago I needed to turn material I’d written for a website into a printed book. I used Apple’s Pages.app to do the work.

Today I had a query from a reader about some of the finer points of using Pages.app for creating a 16 page booklet, and promised to write some Tips here, so others can share them too. Note: I’m using Leopard and Pages 08. If you have a different version of either the OS or Pages things may not work quite the same.

The first thing I did was point out the templates at iWork Community. Find and download one or more templates you like. Decompress the archives. Then quit Pages, and go to your Home folder > Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/My Templates. If some of those folders don’t exist, then create them. Put the new templates inside the My Templates folder.

Now start up Pages.app. When you look at the Template Chooser it contains a new section called My Templates. Choose the template you want to use and start work on your project.

I based my book on the ‘Simple Book’ template. It was designed for the US, so before I started entering content I visited Page Setup and changed the paper size from US Letter to A4. Then I checked through the template’s pages to see if I needed to move anything around in the layout. I found I had to move a tab stop in the Table of Contents to allow for the slightly narrower page.

In case I needed to base another work on the same template, I then made a few other adjustments to fonts and layout that suited me, then finally I chose File > Save as Template …, and saved the modified template with the name ‘Simple Book modified’.

I’ll write more in another post about some techniques for using Pages.app.

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Tagged as: A4, iWork, page size, Pages, templates, US Letter

3 comments

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Mary 14 December 2007 at 16:18 23

Thanks Miraz. Just ‘getting into’ using Pages. A very useful tip.

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Ruffy Heksten 30 December 2007 at 14:23 26

Regarding the Simple Book template, can you tell me how I can manage text flow so that my typing on an odd page spills over into the next ODD page, leaving my EVEN pages for image inserts.

I used Pages in the past and was to LINK text boxes as I liked, but that capability too I do not have in the Simple Book template.

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Donna 11 January 2011 at 10:56 44

Thanks very much for the clear directions! Excellent.

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